HurdAudio has been doing a huge amount of reporting from the Guelph Jazz Festival. His initial post covered Anthony Braxton's keynote speech and contained this quote:
anyone seriously studying composition and making music in this current time-space needs to pay attention to what the video game people are doing. They're navigating a dynamic system that can go just about anywhere at any time and we can learn a lot from their solutions.
Among many other things, there's a report from a panel with William Parker and Amiri Baraka. Regardless of what you may think of him now, you have to admit that this (long-ago?) performance of Baraka's poem "Dope" is devastating.
The Flemish Jazz Meeting is essentially a showcase to hip foreign concert promoters to what's happening in Flanders (though not all musicians involved were Flemish, and a few were even Dutch). It's an insider thing, somewhere between a pageant, a super-market and a mail-order catalogue, that's not even listed on Vooruit's website - I got in because I won a ticket (and, thankfully, I was in excellent company). Five bands each got a short set of generally three songs each.
Robin Verheyen Narcissus Quartet (myspace) Robin Verheyen is maturing out of his wunderkind phase (the challenge, I guess, is to move from impressive to meaningful), no doubt helped by spending a lot of time in New York. Taking off from the more abstract end of '60s bop, they played a single, continuous improvised piece that may (or may not) have incorporated some written material at some points. The quartet moved from colouristic rubato and free-form to a percussive climax and finally slipped into a slow-burn time feel that perpetually threatened to be overturned. Verheyen was mostly above the fray, urgent and slashing on soprano, gentle and thoughtful on tenor. I still find him a little cold, but at least he's working hard to push his music outwards.
VVG Trio + Jozef Dumoulin (website) This was a surprise. On the VVG's first two albums, the open-mindedness was implicit, but the music remained melodically-oriented and neatly organised even at its most improvisational. The three pieces they played here came from a brand-new album I haven't heard yet, and brought in a denser group sound as well as electricity (in the form of an electric bass and pre-recorded sounds). On the third piece, after having looped a sort of sneezing sound that was both funny and irritating, Bruno played with and around a pre-recorded version of the song's melody. The inflexibility of the recording was artfully embedded into a loose almost-groove in an intriguing and unusual way.
The most satisfying piece, though, harked back to the old days. In Gulli Gudmundsson's "Too Soon," against a pre-recorded backdrop of Sigur Ros-ian slow-moving strings and the rustling and plinking of drums and piano, the bassist and Bruno played and played around an elegiac melody.
Jef Neve Trio (myspace) Back again so soon? I'm not complaining. "Sehnsucht," a piece of Schubert-inspired brooding, has become a staple, and in it the jazz looseness and the classical melody sit down and chat like old friends. The other two pieces managed to imply bustling activity and barely-contained enthusiasm even in their quietest moments. Jef is in such a fertile patch right now, he's like the Lil' Wayne of Belgian jazz.
Maak's Spirit (myspace) Quite clearly, Maak's Spirit is the closest thing Belgium has to the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Their usual theatricality was enhanced by a low-budget light show made up of neon lights and studio projectors strewn across the stage and operated by someone sitting next to the drums. The great concert I saw last spring had been based on the compositions from their latest album, but this time they improvised freely and delighted in humourously poking at standard codes of conduct. The dynamic range was vast: they projected more loudly and more harshly than everyone else, despite Laurent Blondiau (trumpet) and Jeroen Van Herzeele (tenor) and Eric Thielemans (drums) not being miked, but ended with a silence (and in near-darkness) caressed only by Jean-Yves Evrard's unplugged electric guitar strumming. Maak's Spirit - "Strange Meeting"
Flat Earth Society (website) A big band that draws the raw energy of Duke Ellington's jungle music into a contemporary complexity and an absurdist sense of humour: a growling wah-wah trumpet solo ended up being accompanied only by a coffee mug. To draw a really blog-centric comparaison, FES is an Industrial Jazz Group with a lot more institutional support and regular work.
Introducing the last of the three pieces, the clarinetist, leader and composer Peter Vermeersch mentioned a cameo by Joseph Goebbels. This turned out to mean FES's accordionist repeatedly interrupting the band, first to instruct them, in German, to play with less swing, then with a flat-footed two-beat, then with less chords and so on, until they were reduced to a single staccato note blown in unison. By that time, the docility with which the Nazi's orders were followed had become a little troubling. It was uplifting and poignant, then, when the musicians (the Goebbels impersonator and Teun Verbruggen, in his third appearance of the evening, excepted) filed out from behind their music stands to gather in a semi-circle at the front of the stage and attempt to reconstruct a quiet, swinging music.
The only album I have of theirs is fairly old and not nearly as good as what they played here, so no MP3.
The strangest thing about this very, very good album is Bobby Bradford's cornet. In fact, it is probably among the strangest cornet/trumpet tones I've ever heard. It is acidic, flattened, bitter to the taste, alienating and seemingly barely keeping a grip on the proceedings but somehow supremely arrogant, too, for example in the way he stands outside the ensemble on "Pumpkin"'s ensemble theme statement. It would be a stretch to say that I loved it, but I am really intrigued, almost fascinated.
One—You have to have a healthy irreverence for what everybody else is doing; two— you have to be willing to take risks; and three—you have to be really confident that what you’re doing is for you. - Bobby Bradford, in Michelle Mercer, "Jazz West"
His exposed lead on the slow and soulful "Dedication" shows just how little he cares about being friendly to you. There's something irreparably cracked about Bradford's playing. This is probably due, at least partially, to the effects of aging: on 1969's Seeking with John Carter, his tone is much purer, his phrasing adheres more closely to the beat and the front-line's unisons have a surgical precision, at the highest of speeds. It is interesting to note the contrast with the age-tempered warmth Charles Tolliver brought to Andrew Hill's Time Lines.
Even compared to his younger bandmates, Bradford seems sour. However brash clarinetist Ben Goldberg and Cline himself get (and they are just as often overtly sweet), they're always ready to make nice and play pretty, as in their duo version of "McNeil Island." Andrea Parkins, here and in Ellery Eskelin's trio, seems to me closest to Bradford's aesthetic.
Pierre Akendengue's "Ta'Nzambe" is to Timbaland as Fela Kuti was to James Brown: it sounds of its time (e.g. production values on female choir and the clipped, interstitial vocal shards at the end) yet sacrifices none of its inherited clattering, multi-meter/-tempo/-everything communal rhythmic complexity, and renders it perhaps even more mind-boggling.
Zoilus recently pointed to this new blog, the introductory post to which tackles a question I sometimes ask myself, especially after reading about a musician delving into traditional musics from far away: what of those countries' modern music?
This one of numerous ways in which world music is constructed leaving most of us thinkin that most countries just have really traditional music, collaborative projects with Ry Cooder and westernized pop in their own language(s). Even then, a lot of times, people tend think of most music from other countries as being "traditional," "folk" or "ethnic", forgetting that other cultures might have a different rubric for pop music, and for classical music.
The only magazine I subscribe to (I'm not quite sure why I like it, as I often find it superficial, they never sent me the two gift CDs they promised and my ideal music magazine is the almost diametrically-opposed Sextant), Vibrations, has a new look and a new web site. It's essentially a well-furnished blog with news, downloads, videos, concert reviews, brief articles and more.
The CD sampler has been dematerialised into an MP3 download that you have to buy the magazine to get. My two favourite tracks are somewhat similar, building culture-hopping patchworks on top of insistent polyrhythmic bases.
Tumi and the Volume "Afrique": a short burst of tense, rapid-fire hip hop-era Afrobeat from South Africa. <
Roberto Fonseca "Ishmael": maybe I'm still in a Cuban mood, but I love the sleek, slightly sinister Afro-Cuban beat, and the arrangement which includes Eastern-ish melodies, blooms of warm Cuban piano splattered with disrupting crashes and a mosquito buzz double-reed (a ney?).
Most of the rest of tracks on the sampler, even when pretty good, sounds a lot more forced and insincere than these two, with Balkan Beat Box (whose 2005 concert I really liked) being the worst offenders.
The duet between a bass and a non-harmonic instrument: if it's not already a cottage industry, it should be. To me, an album of clarinet and bass duets is quite appealing.
WaR, an EP-length album by Rawfishboys (MySpace) a.k.a Joachim Badenhorst (clarinet) and Brice Soniano (bass). They mix delicate and touching songs with some slightly harsher improvised pieces. Sometimes they do both on the same track: "no Fridge For clusters" goes from improv to song and back, turning the old head-solo-head form inside out. Think Giuffre/Bley/Swallow meets, well, Giuffre/Hall/Brookmeyer, but without the middle men. Album-closer "maya" has much of "The Western Suite"'s rustic charm.
"boetie," WaR's first track, falls in the delicate and touching camp. There's a second version later in the album, in which the roles are reversed: the clarinet sighs the descending lament, while the bass provides the surrounding flutters.
Rackham is: Toine Thys - saxophone Laurent Blondiau - trumpet Benjamin Clément - guitar François Verrue - bass Teun Verbruggen - drums
Toine Thys works in a lot of different contexts (the two-tenor Walrus quartet is a treat if you get to hear it in the right context) and is a big Paul Motian fan, but Rackham shows his contemporary jazz-rock side. If I understood correctly, Clément and Verrue are straight-up rock musicians, whereas Blondiau (leader of the excellent Maak's Spirit) and be.jazz friend Verbruggen operate in several of Belgium's most interesting jazz groups. In concert, Clément's distorted/noise solos are particularly crowd-pleasing.
From the website:
Here is just a list of truly inspiring artists who influenced Rackham's music in one way or another: Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Radiohead, Calexico, Jim Black, Chris Speed, Brasilian Girls, Brian Blade Fellowship, Madonna, Jeff Buckley, Nic Thys, Björk, Ryan Scott, the Bloomdaddies, Nirvana, (more to come..
"Olga Und Bernabe" is taken from a 3-song demo recorded in February that Toine gave me a while ago. The song's German title is misleading, as it starts with an Indian-sounding guitar riff and its theme consists of pop/rock inspired stuff that reminds me a bit of the melody of Human Feel's "Not About You" and a lot of André Canniere. What Europe/US divide?
"Spine," another of the demo tracks, is in a similar vein, but less succesful. "Juanita Kligopoulou" is better, and has an acoustic guitar and a Texan trumpet that give it a Calexico-y Far West ambiance. The debut album is expected for the end of the year.
I've also been accumulating some nice e-flyers in my inbox over the last few months. Here they are.
"McNeil Island / Pumpkin"
Buy at 
Stream from 
